Archive for the ‘Jerry Yang’ Category
Memo to Jerry Yang: How to make Yahoo great again | Tech news blog – CNET News.com
Posted on: May 6, 2008
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Re: Getting your company back on track
Now that Yahoo appears to be on its own path, it’s time for the company to find in its past what could again make it great.
Contrary to popular opinion, the key to the future isn’t becoming a technological marvel to rival Google. Instead, Yahoo should home in on what it made it special before the dot-com bust: The Yahoooooo! (cowboy twang inserted) of yesteryear.
Yahoo was an Internet media pioneer. The company built or bought every massively popular feature on the Web today–think Broadcast.com (video), Launch (music) and Groups (social networks). It also developed an advertising engine that could deliver on the dream campaign of any marketer with the data to back up that promise. You could argue Yahoo failed to take advantage of many of those assets in recent years, but the shortcomings haven’t been in vision, they’ve been in execution.
So how does Yahoo move forward? It needs to rebrand itself an Internet media company, quit chasing Google on Web search, and get damn good at selling brand advertising to Madison Avenue once again. And it has to get it done before Google figures out how to turn the creative ad process over to robots. Does technology play a role in that future? Of course. But the emphasis should be on technology that makes ad sales possible, not ad sales that make the technology possible.
“Yahoo was basically built for brand advertisers before brand advertisers came online in a big way. Now that they have come online, Yahoo has to have better technology to allow for better targeting and scale,” said Rishad Tobaccowalo, CEO of the futures-consulting company Denuo, a unit of advertising agency holding company Publicis.
Yahoo certainly has been selling technology, but not in the way Tobaccowalo is talking about. Earlier this year, executives started beating the drum about getting back to the technology roots with new products like advanced e-mail, mobile-search technology, and a universal log-on for Yahoo members across services like Flickr, Mail and Address Book.
Those initiatives are worthwhile, but Yahoo should be selling a bigger story to Madison Avenue, particularly as Google tries to build a division for selling brand advertising alongside search. Sure, Yahoo has advertising platforms like Panama, but the company still isn’t reaping the full value of its media network. Quite simply, it isn’t showing the swagger of its younger years among advertisers. (Note: avoid the cockiness that turned some advertisers off in the early years.)
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